The Sword and the Shield

^TWENTY-EIGHT THE PENETRATION AND PERSECUTION OF THE SOVIET CHURCHES

Though paying lip-service to freedom of religion, the Soviet state was the first to attempt to eradicate the concept of God. Marx had famously denounced religion as “the opium of the people,” but also spoke with some compassion of its role as “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world.” Lenin’s denunciation of religion, however, was uncompromisingly venomous:

During the 1930s most priests were condemned to a gulag from which few returned. Most churches, with their religious symbols removed or defaced but their onion domes usually left more or less intact, were turned into barns, cinemas and garages, or given over to other secular purposes. After two decades of brutal persecution which had left only a few hundred churches open for worship, the Russian Orthodox Church was unexpectedly revived as a public institution by Stalin’s need for its support during the Great Patriotic War. In 1943, after a gap of seventeen years, the Moscow Patriarchate, the Church’s administrative center, was formally reestablished. ² During the remainder of the decade, Orthodox Christians reclaimed and lovingly restored several thousand of their churches.³

The Church, however, paid a heavy price for its restoration. The Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church (later the Council for Religious Affairs) worked in close cooperation with the NKVD and its successors to ensure the subservience of Church to State.⁴ Both Patriarch Aleksi I and Metropolitan Nikolai of Krutitsky and Kolomna, second in the Orthodox hierarchy, joined the World Peace Council, the Soviet front organization founded in 1949, and were highly valued by the KGB as agents of influence.⁵ Aleksi declared in 1955:

The Orthodox Church also took a prominent part in the founding of another front organization, the Christian Peace Conference (CPC), established in 1958 with its headquarters in Prague, in a further attempt to mobilize worldwide Christian support for the “peace policies” of the Soviet Union. At the second conference of the CPC in 1960 delegates from the rest of the world, mostly innocent of its orchestration by Moscow, outnumbered those from the Soviet Bloc.⁷

In 1961, with the KGB’s blessing, the Orthodox Church joined the World Council of Churches (WCC). At that very moment Khrushchev was in the midst of a ferocious anti-religious campaign which closed down many of the reopened churches, monasteries and seminaries and disbanded half the Orthodox parishes. The KGB was simultaneously seeking to strengthen its grip on the churches which remained. According to a secret KGB directive of 1961:

The head of the Second Chief Directorate, General Oleg Mikhailovich Gribanov, reported in 1962 that over the previous two years the KGB had infiltrated “reliable agents” into the leading positions of the Moscow Patriarchate, the Catholic dioceses, the Armenian Gregorian Church and other religious groups. These, he predicted, would make it possible to remove remaining “reactionary Church and sectarian authorities” from their posts.⁹

Since the Russian Orthodox delegates to the WCC were carefully selected by the KGB and the Council for Religious Affairs, it is scarcely surprising that they denied—often indignantly—all reports of the persecution of their Church by the Soviet state. According to a KGB report of August 1969:

The most important of the agents at the WCC central committee meeting in Canterbury was the leader of the Russian Orthodox delegation, Metropolitan Nikodim (agent ADAMANT),¹¹ whose meteoric rise through the Church hierarchy was in itself unmistakable evidence of KGB approval. In 1960, at the age of only thirty-one, Nikodim had become the youngest bishop in Christendom. A year later he was put in charge of the Moscow Patriarchate’s foreign relations department, and in 1964 was appointed Metropolitan of Leningrad. Nikodim took the lead in ensuring that there was no reference in the WCC central committee’s message to member churches either to the invasion of Czechoslovakia or to religious persecution in the Soviet Bloc. According to a report in the Church Times:

The main initiative agreed by the WCC central committee was a call to member churches to become “as fully engaged as possible in the struggle to eradicate racism in whatever form it appears.”¹² While welcoming the campaign against racism, the Church Times deplored the failure of the WCC to address “grave breaches of human rights” or to offer help to the oppressed: “Czechoslovakia springs to mind as an obvious instance.”¹³

The KGB reported that, at the Canterbury conference, its agents had also succeeded “in placing agent KUZNETSOV in a high WCC post.” Agent KUZNETSOV was Alexei Sergeyevich Buyevsky, lay secretary of the Moscow Patriarchate’s foreign relations department headed by Nikodim. Since joining the department in 1946, Buyevsky had accompanied all the major Russian Orthodox delegations abroad and had met the most important visitors from foreign churches to Moscow. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s he played an active role in the work of the WCC central committee, helping to draft policy statements on international affairs.¹⁴

In 1973 the Bishop of Bristol told the Church Times that, of the 130 members of the WCC central committee, 42 percent were Westerners, 28 percent Eastern Orthodox (mainly Russian), and 30 percent from the Third World (mainly Africa). The Russian Orthodox and Third World majority saw Westerners “primarily as the representatives of ‘colonialism’ with all the emotional overtones which that contains.” ¹⁵ KGB agents on the WCC were remarkably successful in dissuading it from paying serious attention to religious persecution in the Soviet Bloc and in persuading it to concentrate instead on the sins of the imperialist West. The Reverend Richard Holloway of the Scottish Episcopal Church told the Nairobi Assembly of the WCC in 1975:

As late as 1989, the Centre claimed that, following the secret implementation of “a plan approved by the KGB leadership,” “the WCC executive and central committee adopted public statements (eight) and messages (three) which corresponded to the political direction of Socialist [Communist] countries.”¹⁷

Members of the Orthodox hierarchy sent on missions to foreign church leaders, doubtless with KGB approval, invariably insisted that believers in the Soviet Union enjoyed freedom of religion. In January 1975 Metropolitan Yuvenali of Krutitsky and Kolomna, who had succeeded his cousin Metropolitan Nikodim as the globetrotting chairman of the Patriarchate’s foreign relations department,¹⁸ traveled to Britain for the enthronement of the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Donald Coggan. In an interview on the BBC World Service, Yuvenali condemned the tendency of “certain circles” in Britain, including some in the Church of England, to give a biased and one-sided view of the Orthodox Church in Russia. In a private meeting with Dr. Coggan, he attacked the Church Times for its “offensive” stories on religious persecution in Russia and denounced Keston College, the world’s leading research center on religion in Communist countries, directed by the Anglican priest Michael Bourdeaux, as “anti-Soviet.” Though courteous, Dr. Coggan was more robust than most of the Western council members of the WCC. Yuvenali appeared incredulous as the Archbishop patiently defended the independence of the Church Times and the fairmindedness of Keston College. During a visit to the Soviet Union two years later Dr. Coggan annoyed his hosts by departing from the prepared itinerary to visit Moscow synagogues and the congregation of the imprisoned Baptist minister, Georgi Vins, in Kiev, where he led the singing of the hymn “He Who Would Valiant Be.”¹⁹

Among KGB agents in the Patriarchate’s foreign relations department who were regularly used as agents of influence in meetings with Western churches was the monk Iosif Pustoutov, who was recruited in 1970, aged twenty-six, with the codename YESAULENKO. Over the next few years YESAULENKO was sent on missions to the Netherlands, West Germany, Italy and France. In 1976 he was appointed representative of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church at the Prague headquarters of the Christian Peace Conference. In order to raise his standing in the religious community, his case officer at the Prague residency, Yevgeni Vasilyevich Medvedev, arranged for him to be regularly invited to embassy receptions given by the Soviet ambassador.²⁰

It would be both simplistic and unjust to see all the KGB’s agents and co-optees in the Orthodox Church and the WCC simply as cynical careerists with no real religious faith—though that may have been true of a minority. Most Russian Orthodox priests probably believed they had no option but to accept some of the demands of state security. One of the best-known dissident priests of the 1970s, Father Dmitri Dudko, later declared:

A minority, however, did successfully resist all the pressure placed on them by the KGB. In December 1991, shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the last deputy chairman of the KGB, Anatoli Oleinikov, told an interviewer that, of the Russian Orthodox priests approached by the KGB, 15 to 20 percent had refused to work for it.²¹ The courageous minority who resisted all KGB pressure were inevitably denied advancement. The section of the Orthodox Church most compromised by its association with the KGB was its hierarchy.

It would be wrong, however, to interpret the deference shown by the hierarchy to the KGB simply in terms of the moral inadequacy of individual bishops. The Church was strongly influenced by a centuries-old tradition of Orthodox spirituality which emphasized submission to both God and Caesar. Before the Revolution, obedience to the Tsar had been regarded almost as a religious obligation.The Orthodox Church had traditionally functioned as a department of state as well as a guide to salvation. Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad, who headed the Russian Orthodox delegation to the WCC until his sudden death during a visit to the Vatican in 1978, impressed many Western Christians by his deep devotion to the Orthodox liturgy and the apparent intensity of his prayer during church services.²² Nikodim’s admirers included Pope John Paul I, who was with him when Nikodim died of a heart attack and said afterwards that he had pronounced during their meeting “the most beautiful words about the Church that I ever heard.”²³ Yet Nikodim was not merely supine in his submission to the Soviet powers-that-be but also a KGB agent.²⁴ So was his private secretary and confidant, Nikolai Lvovich Tserpitsky, who was recruited in 1971 with the codename VLADIMIR.²⁵

A report by the Council for Religious Affairs in 1974 distinguished three categories of Orthodox bishop. The first category

Among the bishops in this category were Patriarch Pimen, who had succeeded Aleksi I in 1971, and Metropolitan Aleksi of Tallinn and Estonia, who in 1990 was to succeed Pimen as Patriarch Aleksi II.²⁶ Both were fulsome in their public praise of Soviet leaders. Pimen even claimed to detect “lofty spiritual qualities” in Andropov, the chief persecutor of religious dissent during his patriarchate. On Andropov’s death Pimen declared that he would always “remember with heartfelt gratitude” his “benevolent understanding of the needs of our Church.”²⁷

Like Patriarch Aleksi I, Pimen was used by the KGB to front Soviet “peace” propaganda, paying gushing and sycophantic tribute to Brezhnev’s “titanic work in the cause of international peace.”²⁸ In February 1976 he, Metropolitan Aleksi and the other metropolitans on the Holy Synod received special awards from the Soviet Peace Fund “for manifold and fruitful activities of the Russian Orthodox Church in the struggle for peace, security and friendship.”²⁹ A month later the Patriarch was given a similar award by the World Peace Council to mark its twenty-fifth anniversary. ³⁰ In June 1977, Pimen hosted a conference at Zagorsk, organized behind the scenes by the KGB, entitled “Religious Workers for Lasting Peace, Disarmament and Just Relations among Nations,” which attracted 663 delegates from 107 countries, representing all the major world religions.³¹ The conference approved a call by Pimen to declare the years up to 2,000 “a period of struggle for peace”—thus, in the KGB’s view, preempting the danger that the Vatican might take the lead in a similar appeal.³² A month later Pimen was awarded the Order of the Red Banner “for his great patriotic activities in defense of peace.”³³

The second category of bishops identified by the Council of Religious Affairs in 1974 consisted of those who, though loyal to the state and “correct” in their observance of the laws on religious observance, wished to “heighten the role of the Church in personal, family and public life… and select for priestly office young people who are zealous adherents of Orthodox piety.” Despite his use as an agent of influence in the World Council of Churches and elsewhere, Metropolitan Nikodim was included in this second category rather than the first—probably because of what was considered his excessive zeal in encouraging religious devotion. The third category of bishops (just under a third of the total) consisted of those “who at different times have made attempts to evade the laws on cults,” though without the conspicuous defiance which would have required their removal from office.³⁴

The first sign of dissidence within the Orthodox Church to gain worldwide publicity during the Brezhnev era was an appeal to the Fifth Assembly of the World Council of Churches at Nairobi in November 1975 by the banned priest Father Gleb Yakunin and the layman Lev Regelson, who appealed for support for the victims of religious persecution in the Soviet Union—a hitherto taboo subject at WCC meetings. ³⁵ A Swiss delegate was applauded when he proposed that a resolution on “Disarmament, the Helsinki Agreement and Religious Liberty” include the statement:

Metropolitan Yuvenali complained that this proposal offended Christian charity. A KGB agent on the drafting committee, Alexei Buyevsky (KUZNETSOV), working “in the spirit of brotherly love, mutual understanding and the spirit of fellowship,” helped produce a formula which avoided any specific reference to the Soviet Union but “recognize[d] that churches in different parts of Europe are living and working under very different conditions and traditions.” The WCC’s general secretary, the West Indian Methodist Dr. Philip Potter, was asked to prepare a report on religious liberty in all countries which had signed the Helsinki Accords. The Times interpreted the WCC resolution as “a sidestep by churches on Soviet curbs.”³⁶

There were no such prevarications in the denunciation of Western racism and imperialism. One of the keynote speakers at the assembly, Dr. Robert McAffie Brown of the Union Theological Seminary, New York, confessed that, as a white, male middle-class American, he embodied the sins of “racism, sexism, classism and imperialism.” In an attempt to avoid “linguistic imperialism,” he then began speaking in Spanish, thus forcing most of his audience to reach for their headsets so that they could hear his address translated back into imperialist English. The WCC’s refusal to consider non-white racism, such as the expulsion of Ugandan Asians in 1972, led to protests and a walk-out by some British delegates—prompting the comment by Dr. Potter that, “Wherever the British have gone in the world they have established a racist system.”³⁷ At the end of the conference, lobbying by the Sovietfront Christian Peace Conference helped to ensure the election of Metropolitan Nikodim (agent ADAMANT) as one of the WCC’s six presidents.³⁸

Had Andropov and the KGB leadership kept any sense of proportion about the threat of “ideological subversion” posed by the few brave dissidents within a generally subservient Orthodox Church, they would have been quite satisfied by the outcome of the Nairobi Assembly. In fact, mild though the WCC response to the appeal from Yakunin and Regelson was, it caused outrage at the Centre.³⁹ Despite complaints by Dr. Potter’s critics in the West that he was “openly anti-Western and anti-capitalist,”⁴⁰ the KGB claimed that, in reality, he had “anti-Soviet leanings” and was “known for his provocative statements about the absence of freedom of conscience in the USSR.”⁴¹ Though he had been given a carefully staged-managed tour of Soviet religious institutions two months before the Nairobi Assembly, Potter had failed to defend them against Yakunin’s and Regelson’s outrageously accurate criticisms. Metropolitan Filaret of Kiev and Gallich told a Novosti correspondent after the assembly:

The Centre organized a flood of letters to the ungrateful Dr. Potter from Russian Orthodox clergy, Baptists and other Soviet Christians, protesting at his alleged hostility towards them. It also sought to orchestrate public criticism of Potter by “prominent religious figures” in Britain, Syria and Lebanon, as well as in the Soviet Union. Further KGB active measures included the publication in Moscow of an English-language book, Religion Under Socialism, and the production of a TV documentary, Freedom of Religion in the USSR, both involving a probably English-speaking agent codenamed “K” (not identified in Mitrokhin’s notes). Attempts were also made to “compromise” Potter personally in various ways and—probably through KGB agents in the WCC—to suggest his replacement as general secretary. Archbishop Kiprian (agent SIMONOV) from the Moscow Church of the Consolation of All Who Sorrow, gave an interview denouncing “fabrications concerning the so-called persecution of believers in the USSR.”⁴³

The absurdity of the KGB’s overreaction to the temporary embarrassment of the Nairobi Assembly and Dr. Potter’s handling of it was well illustrated by his report to the WCC central committee in August 1976 on progress to religious liberty in those countries which had signed the Helsinki Accords. His lengthy address said nothing about religious persecution in the Soviet Bloc, despite extensive, well-documented evidence of it submitted by Keston College and others. Dr. Potter did, however, insist that “it is essential for churches in Europe and north America to be aware of the problems created and maintained by European and American domination of other regions of the world.”⁴⁴

The most serious act of public defiance within the Orthodox Church during the Brezhnev era was, in the Centre’s view, the foundation in December 1976 of the Christian Committee for the Defence of Believers’ Rights in the USSR by Father Gleb Yakunin, Hierodeacon Varsonofy (Khaibulin) and a layman, Viktor Kapitanchuk. The declared aim of the committee, which worked in consultation with the Helsinki Monitoring Group, was to help believers of all denominations “exercise their rights in accordance with their convictions.”⁴⁵ “Yakunin and his associates,” reported the Centre, “are in practice engaging in a struggle with the existing order in the USSR… proclaiming a national religious revival in Russia as an alternative to Marxist-Leninist ideology”:

By 1980—to the consternation of the KGB—eleven volumes of documents totaling 1,189 pages of Russian text, obtained by the Christian Committee, had been published in the West.⁴⁷

The KGB eventually demolished the Christian Committee by its traditional techniques of destabilization, agent penetration and persecution. The Fifth Directorate concluded that the most vulnerable of the committee’s founders was Hierodeacon Varsanofy. With the assistance of GALKIN (an unidentified agent in the Orthodox Church), Varsanofy was assigned early in 1978 to a church in Vladimir region whose incumbent, VOLZHSKY, was a long-standing KGB agent. Finding it difficult to stay in touch with Yakunin and Kapitanchuk, Varsanofy resigned from the Christian Committee. According to Varsanofy’s file, VOLZHSKY introduced him to a sympathetic psychiatrist (also a KGB agent, codenamed BULKIN), who persuaded him that he was suffering from a nervous illness and should give up membership of the Christian Committee in order to reduce the stress he was under and prevent his illness from getting worse. The KGB claimed the credit for inducing Varsonofy “to abandon political activity and concentrate on research work in the field of theology, using materials from the Oblast archives.” While he was working in the archives, another KGB agent, codenamed SPIRANSKY, succeeded in winning his confidence and allegedly “deflected Varsanofy from his obsession of becoming the spokesman of believers in the Soviet Union”:

On September 28, 1978 the Centre secretly promulgated KGB order No. 00122 on “Measures to Strengthen Agent Operational Work in the Struggle with the Subversive Activity of Foreign Clerical Centres and Hostile Elements among Church People and Sectarians”: a lengthy document which reflected both the KGB’s addiction to conspiracy theory and its obsession with “ideological subversion” of all kinds. It also paid unwitting, if irritated, tribute to the courage of the persecuted believers and the vitality of their faith. Mitrokhin’s notes on order No. 00122 include the following:

Following the directives of the May 1975 conference of leading officials of KGB agencies [dealing with religious affairs], it had been possible to carry out measures to strengthen operational positions in international religious organizations, to expose and compromise their leaders, officials and emissaries of clerical centers. Experienced and reliable agents had been infiltrated into the leading circles of some sectarian formations and measures to identify, prevent and terminate the subversive activity of hostile elements among the clerical anti-Soviet underground had become more effective, the further strengthening of the positions of progressive religious figures had been ensured, as well as their active participation in the struggle for peace and other political measures.

Operational work, however, still did not meet present requirements of the present time. The operational situation in a number of sectors of KGB agency work remained tense. The work of disrupting and detaching believers, especially among young people, from the influence of hostile elements was being carried out feebly. Agent positions in the leading ranks of the dissident Baptists, the Catholic and Uniate priesthood, the Pentecostalists, the Adventists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and among the irregular Moslem clerics, were weak.

The USSR KGB Collegium decided as follows:

The Christian Committee for the Defence of Believers’ Rights sought to protect itself against KGB penetration in part by remaining small, never having more than four members at any one time.⁵⁰ In May 1979, however, it was joined by Father Vasili Fonchenkov, unaware that nine years earlier he had been recruited by the Fifth Directorate as agent DRUG (“Friend”). According to his file, “He was involved in the cultivation of specific individuals [in the Orthodox Church], carried out his assignments conscientiously and showed initiative.” Since 1972 Fonchenkov had been a lecturer at the Zagorsk theological academy as well as holding a position in the foreign relations department of the Moscow Patriarchate. In 1976-7 he had been the incumbent of the church of St. Sergi in East Berlin and editor of Stimme der Orthodoxie (Voice of Orthodoxy), the journal of the Patriarchate’s central European exarchate.⁵¹ His contacts with foreign churches may well have helped to recommend agent DRUG to his unwitting colleagues on the Christian Committee.

The KGB campaign against public dissent in the Orthodox Church reached its peak in 1979-80, with a wave of arrests of leading dissidents—chief among them Father Gleb Yakunin—who were later imprisoned or persuaded to recant. Probably to protect his cover, Fonchenkov was summoned for interrogation by the KGB and issued a statement saying that he was threatened with arrest, but was never charged.⁵² During a visit to West Germany in March 1980 Archbishop Pitirim of Volokolamsk (agent ABBAT)⁵³ bizarrely declared that there had been “no wave of arrests.”⁵⁴ The first major success of the KGB campaign was to persuade the charismatic Moscow priest Father Dmitri Dudko, whose offenses included calling for the canonization of Orthodox martyrs of the Soviet era, to make a public recantation on Soviet television in June 1980. Dudko’s resistance had been broken by a particularly skillful KGB interrogator, Vladimir Sergeyevich Sorokin, whom he had come to regard as “my own brother.” He said later that he had hoped that parts of his confession, such as his condemnation of “the sabre-rattling of the Carter administration,” would be recognized as words placed in his mouth by the KGB. His reputation, however, never fully recovered.⁵⁵

There was no prospect of a recantation by Yakunin. Only his wife was allowed to attend his trial. The rest of his family and friends, along with the Western press, were refused admittance, while what one correspondent described as “burly young men in ill-fitting suits,” selected by the KGB, filed into the courtroom. Probably to protect his cover, Fonchenkov was among those who were turned away.⁵⁶ Those called to give evidence against Yakunin included several KGB agents inside the Orthodox Church, among them Iosif Pustoutov (YESAULENKO), former representative of the Moscow Patriarchate at the Prague headquarters of the Christian Peace Conference, who testified to the harmful international consequences of the Christian Committee’s work. Yakunin accepted his sentence of five years’ imprisonment, followed by five years’ internal exile, with the words, “I thank God for this test He has sent me. I consider it a great honor, and, as a Christian, accept it gladly.” The British Council of Churches sent an appeal to Brezhnev, urging the court to reconsider its opinion. Attempts to gain the support of the World Council of Churches for a similar appeal met with no response.⁵⁷

A change in WCC rules before its Vancouver Assembly in 1983 ensured that the KGB suffered no repetition of the embarrassment caused by the discussion of the Yakunin and Regelson letter at the previous assembly seven and a half years earlier. Under the new regulations, probably prompted by the KGB agents on the WCC council:

An open letter from Vladimir Rusak, a Russian Orthodox deacon who had been dismissed for writing an unauthorized history of the Church after the October Revolution, appealed to delegates at Vancouver to “stop treating the propagandistic claims of Soviet delegates as the only source of information” on religion in the Soviet Union. He also urged the assembly to hold a frank debate on religious freedom. The mere discussion of the Yakunin-Regelson letter at Nairobi had “yielded some definite results” by embarrassing the authorities into the “hurried publication” of some copies of the Bible. The assembly also received another letter on behalf of thirty-five imprisoned Soviet Christians and 20,000 persecuted Pentecostalists who wished to emigrate to the West. Unsurprisingly, neither letter received support from Soviet delegates and neither was discussed at the assembly.

The embarrassment of the Afghan War was also successfully contained. Despite the desire of a minority of delegates for “a condemnation of Soviet aggression and the unconditional withdrawal of Soviet troops,” the final compromise resolution called for a Soviet withdrawal only “in the context of an overall political settlement between Afghanistan and the USSR” (conveniently ignoring the fact that the Kabul regime had been installed by the Soviet invaders) and “an end to the supply of arms to the opposition groups from outside” (in other words, the denial of arms to those resisting the Soviet invasion). These were precisely the conditions which the Soviet Union itself laid down for the withdrawal of its troops. Unsurprisingly, the Russian Orthodox delegation praised the final resolution as “balanced and realistic.” The Vancouver Assembly had no such inhibitions in condemning the West. Western capitalism was duly denounced as the main source of injustice in the world, responsible for the evils of sexism, racism, “cultural captivity, colonialism, and neo-colonialism.”⁵⁸

The success, in Moscow’s view, of the Vancouver Assembly, probably helps to explain why the Centre established as one of the priorities for KGB active measures for 1984:

Looking back on his career in the KGB, Oleg Kalugin concludes that, like “the stranglehold over the Church inside the Soviet Union,” the penetration and exploitation of the Russian Orthodox Church abroad was “one of the most sordid and little known chapters in the history of our organization.”⁶⁰ Mitrokhin came to the same conclusion, commenting at one point in his notes that the files contained “a whirlpool of filth.”⁶¹ The KGB used its agents among Russian Orthodox clergy in the West not merely to spy on émigré communities but also to identify possible agent recruits.⁶² Though the Russian Orthodox Church in north America was split, the faction which remained loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate was, according to Kalugin, “riddled with KGB agents.”⁶³ Among the agents identified in the files noted by Mitrokhin was a cleric codenamed PETROV, who was sent to north America in the 1970s. His case officers in north America contacted him by using the passwords “Pyotr Mikhailovich,” the first name and patronymic of his Fifth Directorate controller in Moscow.⁶⁴

The file on Arkadi Rodyonovich Tyshchuk (VORONOV), a priest who was posted to the Nikolsky Russian Orthodox cathedral in New York from 1977 to 1982, contains evidence of a hostility to the United States which may also have helped to motivate other Orthodox priests in the KGB’s north American network. The United States, VORONOV told his KGB case officer, suffered from the sin of pride—“and pride comes before a fall:”

VORONOV usually met his controller from the New York residency either at the Soviet mission to the United Nations, where he went to collect his correspondence from Russia, or on board the ship Mikhail Lermontov, which regularly came into port at New York. More difficult to explain than his hostility to the United States was his apparent admiration for the KGB which, according to his file, he bizarrely described as a “good shepherd” and a “true Russian spiritual guardian and shepherd.”⁶⁵

Russian Orthodox priests in the West were also used by FCD Directorate S to collect material for use in devising the well-documented legends of KGB illegals. In the early 1970s, for example, two KGB agents in the Moscow Patriarchate were sent to carry out detailed research on parish registers in Canada. Ivan Grigoryevich Borcha (codenamed FYODOR), who worked as a priest in prairie parishes of Ukrainian and Romanian communities, studied registers in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Viktor Sergeyevich Petlyuchenko (PATRIOT), who was assigned to Orthodox parishes in Edmonton, carried out further research in Alberta.⁶⁶

The Russian Orthodox Church, both at home and abroad, took a prominent part in the Rodina (“Motherland”) Society founded as a front organization by the KGB in December 1975 to promote “cultural relations with compatriots abroad,” and thus provide new opportunities for agent recruitment among émigré communities. Its vice-president, P. I. Vasilyev, was a senior member of the FCD’s Nineteenth (Soviet émigré) Department and headed a secret Rodina intelligence section.⁶⁷ Metropolitan Aleksi of Tallinn and Estonia (agent DROZDOV),⁶⁸ the future Patriarch Aleksi II, who was made a Rodina council member, told its opening conference, “We are all united by our love for our Socialist motherland.” Through its exarchates, dioceses and parishes in Europe, America, Asia and Africa, the Orthodox Church “continued to maintain spiritual ties with our compatriots” and was “doing its best to keep these contacts alive and active.”⁶⁹ Metropolitan Aleksi is unlikely to have been unaware that these contacts were exploited by the KGB. According to a KGB document of 1988, “An order was drafted by the USSR KGB chairman to award an honorary citation to agent DROZDOV” for unspecified services to state security.⁷⁰

THOUGH NEVER FULLY satisfied by the extent of its stranglehold over the Orthodox Church, the KGB was far more concerned by the “subversive” activities of those Christians over whom it had no direct control. The largest of the underground churches was the Greek Catholic (or Uniate) Church of Ukraine (nowadays the Ukrainian Catholic Church), whose liturgy and structure followed the “Eastern Rite” but which accepted the authority of Rome. Fearful at the end of the Second World War that the Uniate Church would provide a focus for Ukrainian nationalism, Stalin set out to terrorize it into submission to Moscow. In 1946 a mock synod in Lviv cathedral, staged by the MGB with the assistance of a small number of Uniate stooges and the blessing of the Orthodox hierarchy, announced the “reunion” of the Greek Catholics with the Russian Orthodox Church. Greek Catholic Archbishop (later Cardinal) Josyf Slipyj wrote later:

Almost overnight, the four million Uniate Christians became the world’s largest illegal church. All but two of its ten bishops, along with many thousands of priests and believers, died for their faith in the Siberian gulag.⁷¹

In 1963 Slipyj was expelled to Rome, leaving Bishop (later Archbishop) Vasyl Velychkovsky as effective leader of the underground church. The KGB immediately deployed five agents—TIKHOV, SIDORENKO, ROMANENKO, SOVA and PODOLENIN (none identified in Mitrokhin’s notes)—in a series of attempts to discredit Velychkovsky among the persecuted Uniate faithful. TIKHOV, evidently a member of the underground church, periodically sent to Slipyj in the Vatican letters containing disinformation about Velychkovsky fabricated by the Centre. According to KGB files, Slipyj sent his own emissaries to the Ukraine to check the truth of the allegations against his successor, but agents who were planted on them confirmed TIKHOV’s fabrications.⁷² KGB reports, however, probably overstated the success of their active measures. There is no convincing evidence of a breach between Slipyj and Velychkovsky.

In July 1967 a conference of senior officials of Soviet Bloc intelligence agencies met in Budapest to discuss “work against the Vatican; measures to discredit the Vatican and its backers; and measures to exacerbate differences within the Vatican and between the Vatican and capitalist countries.”⁷³ Two senior KGB officers, Agayants and Khamazyuk, addressed the conference on “The Hostile Activity of the Vatican and of the Catholic and Uniate Clergy on the Territory of the USSR and the Experience of the [KGB] Agencies in Countering this Activity.” A third, Kulikov, spoke on “Some aspects of agent operational work against Vatican institutions.” On the proposal of the KGB delegation, all but the Romanian representatives agreed on the need to intensify “work against the Vatican in close relation with the work against the Main Adversary.” Andropov, who regarded the Uniates as the spearhead of the Vatican’s ideological sabotage offensive in the Soviet Union, wrote to the Central Committee, emphasizing the importance of the conference’s conclusions.⁷⁴

Andropov’s obsession with ideological subversion by the Holy See was doubtless reinforced by the claim in a 1968 intelligence report that the Vatican’s Secretariat of State had devised a masterplan to shatter the unity of the Soviet Union and had given the Deputy Secretary of State, Cardinal Giovanni Benelli, the task of implementing it.⁷⁵ A Centre assessment of 1969 repeated the claim that the Vatican was out “to shatter the Soviet Union from within with the help of ideological sabotage”:

A professional antireligioznik from the Ukraine, speaking at an official conference in 1969, paid unwitting tribute to the continued vitality of the persecuted Uniates:

On April 4, 1969 Andropov approved further “measures to intensify the struggle against subversive activity by the Vatican and the Uniates on the territory of the USSR in 1969-70,” to be implemented jointly by the FCD, the Fifth (Dissidents and Ideological Subversion) Directorate and local KGBs. The FCD was instructed, somewhat ambitiously, to attempt the agent penetration of all major sections of the Vatican bureaucracy, the Jesuit order, the Russicum and other pontifical colleges training priests for Eastern churches, as well as to make operational contact with three Roman clerics—codenamed APOSTOL, RASS and SLUGA—who had been born in the Soviet Union.⁷⁸ Among the few successes in this ambitious program by the end of 1969 which Mitrokhin found in Centre files was the penetration of pontifical colleges by KGB agents from the legally established Catholic Church in the Soviet Union, particularly the Baltic republics. PETROV and ROGULIN, both agents of the Fifth Directorate, had arrived in Rome in January 1968 to begin three years’ study at the Russicum; in 1969 they went on an intelligence-gathering mission to “Catholic centers” in France and Belgium.⁷⁹ During 1969, two KGB agents from Lithuania, ANTANAS and VIDMANTAS, were studying at the Gregorian University. ⁸⁰ Two other Lithuanian agents, DAKTARAS (a bishop) and ZHIBUTE, took part in the working commission for the reform of the Canon Law Codex, held at the Vatican from May 21 to June 11, 1969. DAKTARAS told his case officer that, at a papal audience on June 7, Paul VI had told him, “I remember you in my prayers and hope that God will help the clergy and believers [in Lithuania].”⁸¹

With the assistance of the Hungarian AVH, the KGB also succeeded in cultivating a member of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Eastern Church, Uniate Bishop Dudás, who was resident in Hungary. A Fifth Directorate female agent, POTOCHINA, who had probably infiltrated the underground church in Ukraine, traveled regularly to Hungary on the pretext of visiting a relative and—according to her file—succeeded in winning Dudás’s confidence.⁸² Dudás doubtless never suspected that she was a KGB agent, sent to obtain intelligence on the Vatican’s secret contacts with the Ukrainian Uniates.

The operations against the Vatican approved by Andropov in April 1969 also included a series of active measures. The KGB was instructed to find ways of creating distrust between émigré clerics in Rome and Uniates and other Catholics in the Soviet Union. The leading KGB agents in the Russian Orthodox Church who were in contact with the Vatican—DROZDOV (Metropolitan Aleksi), ADAMANT (Metropolitan Nikodim), SVYATOSLAV and NESTEROV (both unidentified)—were instructed “to cause dissension between Vatican organizations such as the Congregation for the Eastern Church, the Secretariat for Christian Unity and the Commission for Justice and Peace.” In order to put pressure on the Vatican “to cease its subversive activity,” ADAMANT was also instructed to tell his contacts in the Roman Curia that the Soviet government was contemplating establishing autonomous Catholic churches in the Baltic republics and elsewhere in the Soviet Union which would be independent of Rome. The Lithuanian bishop DAKTARAS passed on the same message when he attended a bishop’s conference in Rome in October 1969.⁸³ There is no evidence that any of the active measures had a discernible effect on Vatican policy.

As well as giving higher priority to operations against the Vatican, Andropov also stepped up the persecution of the Ukrainian Uniates. In 1969 the head of the underground church, Bishop Velychkovsky, was arrested and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. The KGB reported that his arrest “greatly helped to achieve a psychological breakthrough in the mind of SERAFIM,” another leading figure in the Uniate underground, who was recruited as a KGB agent. According to Mitrokhin’s notes on his file:

Though SERAFIM agreed to “cooperate secretly” with the KGB, he refused to sign the written undertaking required of most informers. His controller did not insist, on the grounds that it would represent too great “a psychological trial for a man of religion” and leave him in fear of “divine punishment in the next world.” Another agent, terrified of “being cast into Hell,” had once begged the controller, on bended knee, to return his signed undertaking.⁸⁴

In 1971 the KGB also succeeded in recruiting in Lviv one of the leading members of an underground order of Uniate monks, codenamed IRENEY, who served as one of the main points of contact with the Catholic Church in Poland. The Fifth Department regarded IRENEY as a tough nut to crack. If confronted directly with his “illegal activity,” he would probably be strong enough to withstand the usual uncompromising interrogation. If given too many details of his activities, he would be able to identify members of the underground church who had informed on him. The KGB decided to begin by mounting a major surveillance operation on IRENEY’s sister and “conspiratorial” collaborator, MARIYA. After MARIYA’s sudden death, with IRENEY in deep depression, his case officer judged that the time was ripe for “a complex recruitment operation.” IRENEY was brought in for interrogation and given extensive details of his ministry in the underground church, carefully designed to give the misleading impression that MARIYA had been informing on him for many years. Mitrokhin’s notes give the following summary of the interrogator’s self-congratulatory report:

IRENEY remained so convinced that his sister had been a KGB agent that, when passing information to his controller, he frequently added the comment, “No doubt my sister told you this.” According to his KGB file, he never ceased to marvel at the way in which sister had succeeded in keeping her KGB connection a secret from him.⁸⁵

In 1972, like Slipyj nine years earlier, Bishop Velychkovsky was deported to the Vatican. A year later the KGB managed to gain access to Slipyj. Cardinal Felici invited to the Vatican a leading Uniate cleric from Czechoslovakia, unaware that he was a KGB agent codenamed PROFESSOR. Originally recruited by the Czechoslovak StB, PROFESSOR had been used by the KGB in 1971 to go on a supposedly “pastoral” visitation of the Redemptorist Order in Ukraine in order to provide intelligence on the activities of the underground church and its links with Rome. In September 1973 he met Slipyj in the Vatican. Plans were made for PROFESSOR to meet the Uniate leadership in Lviv, but Mitrokhin’s notes do not record whether this meeting went ahead.⁸⁶

In February 1975 a conference of Soviet Bloc intelligence services considered the coordination of operations against, and agent penetration in, the Vatican.⁸⁷ The Polish SB, Czechoslovak StB and Hungarian AVH all reported that they had “significant agent positions in the Vatican.” Mitrokhin’s notes record no such claim by the KGB. As at the similar conference in 1967, however, a hugely ambitious and unrealistic program for agent penetration was drawn up, which included plans to cultivate the Uniate leadership and no fewer than seven cardinals (Casaroli, Willebrands, Kînig, Samorä, Benelli, Poggi and Pignedoli), as well as an elaborate series of active measures to influence and discredit the Catholic Church.⁸⁸

Among the individual targets for character assassination was Velychkovsky’s successor as head of the underground Uniate Church, Bishop (later Metropolitan Archbishop) Volodymyr Sternyuk. Agent NATASHA spread disinformation about Sternyuk’s alleged sexual immorality and the same stories were passed by other agents to the Vatican. As a result, according to KGB reports, “he lost the support of a significant part of the Uniates.”⁸⁹ In reality, despite a new and vicious round of religious persecution in the early 1980s, the KGB lost its war against the Uniates. In 1987 Sternyuk emerged from the underground at the age of eighty-one with the status of a national hero, openly acknowledged by Rome as head of the Catholic Church in Ukraine—to the dismay of both the KGB and most of the Orthodox hierarchy. Metropolitan Filaret of Kiev and Galich insisted as late as October 1989, “The Uniates will never be legalized in our country.” They were legalized by the end of the year.⁹⁰

AFTER THE UNIATES and other Catholics, the KGB was most concerned during its war against religious “ideological subversion” in the Soviet Union by the activities of the unregistered Protestant churches and sects, which—like the Uniates—were outside direct state control. In the late 1950s the KGB estimated the membership of what it termed “illegal sectarian formations”—chief among them the Reform Baptists, Pentecostalists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Reformed Adventists—at about 100,000.⁹¹

The fact that throughout the Brezhnev era the KGB continued, on Andropov’s instructions, to spend so much time and effort on groups who represented no conceivable threat to the Soviet system is further evidence of its obsession with even the most harmless forms of dissent. Andropov made the keynote of his address to an allunion KGB conference in 1975 the claim that anti-Soviet elements were conspiring against the state “under cover of religion.” The first essential in unmasking and defeating the conspiracies was agent penetration:

Andropov’s complaint that believers failed to trust the “humanism” of the KGB provides further evidence of his limited sense of the absurd. To illustrate the difficulties of agent penetration among the ungrateful sectarians, he gave the example of “one candidate for recruitment, who had almost freed himself from errors with regard to the Cheka, and carried out particular assignments from an operational officer:”

Mitrokhin cannot have been the only KGB officer who, as he listened to such speeches or read articles on operations against believers in the classified in-house journal KGB Sbornik, secretly admired their courage and their faith. No hint of that admiration, however, appeared in KGB reports.

By the 1960s the KGB leadership had reluctantly concluded that no amount of persecution would wipe out the sectarians altogether. A conference in March 1959 of senior KGB officers leading “the struggle against Jehovists [Jehovah’s Witnesses]” concluded that the correct strategy was “to continue measures of repression with measures of disruption.”⁹³ The KGB set out to divide, demoralize and discredit the sectarians, as well as to arrest their most influential leaders on trumped-up charges.

In 1966 Pastors Georgi Vins and Gennadi Kryuchkov, the leaders of the Reform Baptists, probably the largest sectarian group, were jailed for three years. After their release, both went underground to continue their ministry. In 1974 Vins was caught and rearrested. Despite a major international campaign on his behalf, he was sentenced to a further ten years’ imprisonment, but was released in a “spy exchange” in 1979 and expelled to the United States. Pastor Kryuchkov remained at liberty until 1989, when he dramatically reappeared in public at an emotional Reform Baptist congress. His success in continuing a secret ministry for almost twenty years without being caught by the KGB remains one of the most astonishing achievements in the history of the Soviet religious underground.⁹⁴

Remarkably, however, the KGB was even more concerned by Jehovah’s Witnesses, viewed with indifference or suspicion by most governments around the world, than by the Reform Baptists, whose heroic endurance of persecution attracted international sympathy. The head of the Second Chief Directorate, General Oleg Mikhailovich Gribanov, reported in 1962, “The most hostile of the sectarians are the Jehovists.”⁹⁵ Since their emergence in the United States in the 1870s, no other Christian sect has spent so much of its energies on prophesying the end of the world. Though many of its detailed prophecies have been discredited and the Apocalypse has been repeatedly postponed, the basic millennarian message of Jehovah’s Witnesses has never varied: “The end is near. Christ will reveal himself shortly to bring destruction upon the nations and all who oppose is messianic kingdom.”⁹⁶

In the course of the twentieth century Jehovah’s Witnesses have been persecuted by many authoritarian regimes. Thousands suffered martyrdom in the death camps of the Nazi Third Reich. No major intelligence agency, however, has been quite as concerned as the KGB by the “Jehovist conspiracy.” The Jehovist obsession of senior KGB officers was, perhaps, the supreme example of their lack of any sense of proportion when dealing with even the most insignificant forms of dissent.

Until the Second World War there had been no Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Soviet Union. The incorporation of eastern Poland, Lithuania and Moldavia in 1939-40, however, turned thousands of Witnesses into unwilling Soviet citizens.⁹⁷ Many were deported to Siberia, accused of being “an American sect.”⁹⁸ In 1968 the KGB put the total number of Jehovah’s Witnesses at about 20,000.⁹⁹ The fact that the Witnesses had originated in the United States and still had their world headquarters in Brooklyn was regarded as deeply suspicious by the Centre’s many conspiracy theorists.¹⁰⁰ The almost surreal outrage of KGB analysts, as they denounced the Witnesses for describing the Soviet state (like states in general) as the work of the Devil, would not be out of place in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita:

The Soviet press, meanwhile, accused the Witnesses’ Brooklyn headquarters of organizing an aggressive crusade against the countries of the Soviet Bloc.¹⁰²

The Centre was disturbed by reports that, even in labor camps, “the Jehovah leaders and authorities did not reject their hostile beliefs and in camp conditions continued to carry out their Jehovah work.” A conference of KGB officers working on operations against Jehovah’s Witnesses met at Kishinev in November 1967 to discuss new measures “to prevent the sectarians’ hostile work” and “ideological subversion:”

The seriousness with which the conference discussed the Jehovist menace was, once again, almost surreal. The allegedly dangerous conspiracy which the Centre devoted so many resources to combating amounted to little more than the attempt by small groups to worship together in private, mostly in each others’ homes, and their refusal to perform military service. Yet the conspiracy was judged so dangerous that the conference agreed on the need for agent penetration of the Brooklyn headquarters and its west European branches.¹⁰⁴ It was also feared that Brooklyn might correctly identify some Jehovah’s Witnesses who had gone long periods without arrest as KGB agents. The conference therefore agreed on the need to “create a reliable reserved of understudy agents” for use if the existing agents were unmasked.¹⁰⁵

As well as grossly exaggerating the menace of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and other sectarians, the KGB Sbornik also contained self-congratulatory accounts of the active measures used to destabilize them. One such case study in the mid-1970s concerned the leader of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Khmelnitskaya Oblast, codenamed PAVEL, whose “criminal activities consisted of drawing new members into the sect, conducting illegal gatherings, inducing young believers to refuse to serve in the army, holding and disseminating religious literature.” The KGB concocted “well-documented defamatory materials” which were used in a press campaign against him. Even PAVEL’s children from his first marriage were persuaded to sign a newspaper article about him. Finally an evening meeting was arranged by the KGB in Shepetovka, attended by local Jehovah’s Witnesses, as well as representatives of the Party, provincial administration, collective farms and newspapers, at which PAVEL was subjected to a series of doubtless well-rehearsed denunciations of his alleged indolence, cruelty, egoism and dissolute behavior. The KGB report on the meeting noted with satisfaction that the evening ended in PAVEL’s utter humiliation and the “unrestrained sobbing” of his second wife.¹⁰⁶

Like the other sectarians, Jehovah’s Witnesses showed an astonishing capacity to survive persecution. During the Gorbachev era, the KGB’s campaign against them gradually disintegrated. In October 1989, doubtless to the outrage of many KGB officers, the head of the European department of the Brooklyn Centre, Willi Pohl, arrived in Moscow as the guest of the Council of Religious Affairs to visit Soviet Witness communities and discuss their future.¹⁰⁷

DURING THE LATER 1980s the Moscow Patriarchate seemed to be trying neither to fall behind nor to overtake the speed at which the official programs of glasnost and perestroika were developing. In 1991, a year after succeeding Pimen as Patriarch, Aleksi II, finally dissociated himself and the Russian Orthodox Church from the “declaration of loyalty” to the Soviet system issued by Metropolitan Sergi in 1927. When an interviewer reminded him that, a quarter of a century earlier, the Council for Religious Affairs had classed him as one of those bishops most loyal to the state, the Patriarch asked for forgiveness and understanding of his attitude at the time. As the Soviet Union began to disintegrate in the final months of 1991, Aleksi II declared that “Russia has suffered a severe illness in the form of Communism.”¹⁰⁸

The Russian Orthodox Church, however, continued to be haunted by its past history of KGB penetration. After the failure of the August coup in 1991, the Russian government’s Committee on Freedom of Conscience, which included Father Gleb Yakunin, was given access to a section of the KGB archives which showed that some members of the Orthodox hierarchy had been KGB agents. After Yakunin published a selection of the documents, the archives were closed once more; he was accused of having betrayed state secrets to the United States and threatened with a private prosecution. ¹⁰⁹ Father Gleb remained defiant. He wrote to the Patriarch in January 1994:

The letter to Aleksi II was unprecedented in the history of the Russian Orthodox Church—for, as the Patriarch must surely have been aware, DROZDOV, the most important of the KGB agents discovered by Father Gleb in the KGB archives, was in fact himself.